06 January 2019 1:36 AM

PETER HITCHENS: Why those few desperate people in dinghies really are a danger to Britain...

We aren’t grateful enough for the English Channel. Personally, I give thanks for it every day, but that is because I have been out in the world quite a lot and know just how dangerous our planet is.

That short, rough stretch of sea is what has enabled us to create one of the greatest civilisations in human history.

It is continuity, stability, peace, mutual understanding and long-accu mulated experience that make civilisations. Without them, the most vital ingredient of human society – trust – cannot develop or flourish.

Look at the rest of Europe, unprotected by deep water. Every century or so there’s an invasion, or a devastating war in which the enemy’s armies sweep through, burning, looting and worse.

A little further back, and you find vast movements of population, in which people who thought they were safe and settled were displaced or subjugated by stronger, crueller or simply more energetic and hungry peoples.

This process hasn’t stopped. China’s neighbours, and minority nations living under China’s rule, face a combination of ancient ruthlessness and modern secret police efficiency.

The Turkic people of China’s far west, and the Tibetans too, are being rapidly turned into dispossessed, humiliated minorities in their own lands.

People who moan constantly about the long-ago misdeeds of the British Empire are strangely silent about China’s steely modern colonialism.

And then there is the vast surge of humans brought about by those three Olympic-standard idiots George W. Bush, Anthony Blair and David Cameron.

Their various thought-free, vain adventures and interventions, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, have set the whole world on the move towards Europe, from as far east as Kandahar and as far south as the Congo.

Nobody can blame the migrants for seeking better lives elsewhere, but if they all do so, they will destroy the very thing they are seeking.

There has been nothing like it in modern times. If we do not check it, it will transform Europe into somewhere else in two generations.

Britain is far better-placed than other countries, thanks to the sea which surrounds us. But salt water alone will not do the job. We have to patrol it and turn back the uninvited. If we do not, the sea becomes an open door, with every beach a port of entry.

A lot of people are currently mocking the idea that the migrants making their way across the Channel are an important issue. They say the numbers are small. They were small, too, when they first began to arrive in Greece, in Spain, in Sicily and Malta.

Then word spread that those seas were open. And the numbers quickly stopped being small.

People-smugglers are not fools. They can quickly see and exploit any opportunity.

If I had anything to do with it, I would tow them all back to free, democratic France on sight and tell the French (correctly) it was for their benefit too. After all, if they knew they couldn’t get into Britain, most of them wouldn’t come to France in the first place.

And the fact they don’t want to stay in France proves they are not refugees, but migrants.

But if that doesn’t work, perhaps we could copy Australia, and pay (say) Greenland to take them in, unless they agreed to go home, with an absolute guarantee that nobody who arrived here illegally, or was caught trying to do so, would ever be allowed to stay here.

Or we can do nothing much, and say goodbye to Britain.

****

The ‘peaceful drug’ that’s causing carnage

Will it ever sink in? The authorities are still trying their best to claim that the knife incident in Manchester was part of some sort of terrorist grand plan. All that spending on ‘security’ has to be justified somehow. But the suspect has, in fact, been detained under the Mental Health Act.

Anyone with his wits about him knows that there are far more crazy people about than there used to be, many of them with knives, and it isn’t much of a stretch to connect this with the fact that the police and the courts have given up enforcing laws against marijuana, which some idiots still say is a ‘peaceful drug’.

Well, not always, I think. There’s been an above-average rise in aggravated assaults and murders in the first four US states to legalise marijuana for recreational use. And Finland and Denmark have recorded significant rises in mental illness since 2000, also following an increase in marijuana use.

Cannabis laws, it turns out, don’t greatly increase the numbers of people taking the drug. But they do mean that those who do use it, use it more heavily. Amazing that, as the evidence of its danger piles up, we should even be thinking of legalising it here, as the Billionaire Big Dope Lobby wants.

****

Everyone in the Army knows that service recruitment problems began when the job was outsourced to the unloved Capita. But the latest idea, actually begging snowflakes to join up, must be driven by desperation. Why try to hire people as soldiers who don’t like fighting? Next, look out for a campaign to recruit people with a fear of flying for the RAF, and people who hate getting wet for the Navy. Or we could just get rid of Capita, and go back to sending recruiting sergeants out into the pubs on a Saturday night.

****

I suspect the Tory Party lost the next Election on New Year’s Day, when huge numbers of railway season-ticket holders in the South East were forced to pay more for less. Many will need to take out loans to find the money for a miserable, disorganised non-service that infuriates its users even more by perpetually offering insincere apologies for things it will do again the next day, and has no intention of putting right.

It is only in the South East that railways are so vital. But it is also in the South East that the Tories cannot afford to lose votes. By the way, don’t tell me that the railways were worse under BR. I remember BR very well, and it’s not true. If they’d been given the money squandered on the fly-by-night privateers, they’d have run a decent railway.

******

If I ran a university, I think I’d start a course on just how utterly wrong most films are about the past. You could do a whole term on how completely false the new film ‘The Favourite’ is. It is supposed to be about Queen Anne. Almost everything in it, from the alleged Royal lesbianism to the rabbits and the supposed abduction of the Duchess of Marlborough is either baseless speculation or totally made up. Yet when I went to see it in a grand university town, the cinema was packed. Is it the same-sex love, the monarchy, the four-letter words or what, which bring the pseudo-intellectual middle classes into the cinema these days?

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To Charlie B, who writes of Mr Hitchens possibly "[attracting] large numbers of... fans of Tommy Robinson..." This is not just a possibility, but an unfortunate fact (see the comments under the blog entry "Delusions about 'Tommy Robinson'").

Mr Hitchens should write more about the Sermon on the Mount or aspects of Islam that he admires. That will repel them. Like planting citronella in the garden.

Sally is obsessed with numbers. How many refugees? How long is a piece of string?
The answer is more than zero. I would like the UK’s response to the refugee crisis to be fair, adequate and proportionate, as a concerted effort in cooperation with other western countries. That is why articles like the one written last Sunday by Mr Hitchens make me angry, because they stoke anti-immigrant sentiment, which ultimately is the main obstacle for such a coordinated response to be put in place. Fear mongering, slippery slope logical fallacy (if we let one in, a million will come), and the nationalistic narrative of a civilisation under threat are all combined to make the readers reject foreigners. Mr Hitchens should not be surprised if, with articles like this week’s column, he attracts large numbers of followers who are also die-hard fans of Tommy Robinson.
Between Brexit and Britain’s response to the refugee crisis, this country is far from profiling itself as a great civilisation, but more like a selfish, nasty little country.

Charlie B
Where is the sense in bringing workers over to pay lower wages, but much higher than many can earn in their own country, turning once family homes into rooms, yet also because wages are still low in terms of benefit support here, have wages topped up and also send benefit for any children they have home?
Just who is this suiting?
What it does I can see is make certain areas poorer, look neglected, visible change.
It's sad to see places run down more, when you know it was once local working class areas, kept with pride.
The politicians don't seem to realise that we will observe very sharply what their policies are leading to.

A councillor has veen slapped down for non PC remarks recently in my county.
Not by many local people, including me, borne from frustration, but it's caused a stir!

To Charlie,
Thank you for informing us that there are many 'people desperately in need of assistance... due to conflict.' I would say no-one here has learned anything from your contributions, which are short on facts and insight. The one thing you have undoubtedly established is your claim to be on the side of compassion.

It is not easy for an asylum seeker with nothing to pay traffickers to travel to the West, which is why those who come are mainly from middle class backgrounds. The route by which normal, poor men cross borders (the activity is not recommended for women) is to be mules for smugglers. Women and children can only come if they have enough to pay to be driven. Coming from Herat, a poor migrant would carry high-value goods through Pashtun territory to Quetta, making use of the tribal cross-border alliances. From Quetta you go to Taftan, this time guarded by Balochi tribesmen. From Iran you pass into Iraq, and here the route gets really dangerous, as you need to contact the Komalah. If you cannot pay 8,000 dollars, they will dress you as a Kurd in baggy trousers, and load you up with 50 litres of petrol. You labour over mountain paths which are not carefully guarded, but occasionally very dangerous. Your safety relies on an uneasy stand-off between the armies and tribesmen who will go to violent extremes to preserve their sources of income. If by this time your health has not given way, you must avoid assorted checkpoints in Iraq unless you have enough to pay bribes. The border crossing from Zakho into Turkey, watched over by the PKK, is for some reason less difficult. You should not use intercity buses within Turkey, as the police stop just about every bus from Van to Istanbul. Once in that immense concrete jungle you are safe, and can even find unregistered labouring work. Then you are at ease to plan the further leg of your journey to the West.

"If I was a genuine refugee, fleeing from a real threat of death, and I made it to safe ground with my family, say France, I would be just very thankful. I wouldn’t then say, “right, let’s get to Calais so I can try London for size. I hear the benefits are more beneficial.”

Posted by: Sally | 10 January 2019 at 06:26 PM

Actually you probably would – if you'd heard that it was a practical possibility and that trying and failing carried no penalty, no matter how many times you tried it. That's the nub of the problem. It needs to be made unambiguously clear that to attempt to enter illegally by stealth stood very little chance of succeeding and further, that to attempt it would leave you worse off, not better. At the moment it's akin to gambling in a casino where, if you lose you get your chips back, so you can try again until, eventually you win and then you get to cash them in.

. . . and therefore surely well positioned to help some of the people most desperately in need of assistance after having to flee their home countries due to conflict, violence and persecution.
Posted by: Charlie B | 11 January 2019 at 02:27 PM

We do help. Not least to the tune of the £13.4 billion per year in taxpayers' money doled out in foreign aid. Plus, the British public gave a further £10.3 billion to charity in 2017, much of it raised and donated to the many and various NGOs and quangoes to finance their various foreign aid projects, although the percentage of their gross income which actually reaches its proclaimed purpose is a different scandal.
If this country should ever be stupid enough to open its borders in the manner suggested by some writing in these comments, this country will no longer be in a position to help anyone, having ceased to exist. There would be no winners.

I completely agree that GDP is an obsolete way of assessing the economic health of a country. I only used it to echo the claim regularly made by Brexiters that the UK is "the 5th largest economy in the world", i.e. one of the richest countries in the world, and therefore surely well positioned to help some of the people most desperately in need of assistance after having to flee their home countries due to conflict, violence and persecution.

C. Morrison: Do you remember the huge outcry in parliament and in the media when George Galloway (then a sitting MP) was the victim of a vicious and sustained physical assault on the street - from a man who took exception to his critical stance on Israel?

Simply saying that the UK has the 5th largest GDP in the world says nothing about the actual wealth of the country. A better indicator is GDP per capita. On that scale the UK comes in around 22-25 depending on whose doing the calculations. Not so impressive.
Posted by: John McCarthy | 10 January 2019 at 09:05 PM

Absolutely. It is very easy to conflate the true wealth of this country with the paper value of international financial transactions which happen to take place within these shores. Much of what counts as GDP has no impact on the lives of most people.

Apart from The City itself, another good example of this conflation is football. Everyone boasts about how the English Premier League is a world leader (in its field?) but in reality it isn't really English football at all. Foreign-owned clubs, employing mostly foreign players, directed by foreign managers and deriving the bulk of their wealth as income from foreign global TV syndication fees, the matches happen to be played and filmed here, that's all. For the majority of the millions of people who watch Premier League football globally, it is primarily a television experience to which the English public contribute by bringing their scarves, banners and rattles, providing the crowd scenes necessary to give the TV pictures the essential atmosphere, much in the manner of film extras. Our football grounds are, for all intents and purposes, movie sets.

Nothing wrong with any of this of course, as long as we understand the reality of the situation, but the delusion that this international corporate enterprise is somehow "English football," is exposed every four years in the World Cup, where we try to match a team of actual English players against the rest of the world.

Peter Hitchens offers the following statement on morality: "morality is what a person does when no-one is looking." ***PH : To be more precise ;When he *thinks* nobody is looking' ****This is similar to "religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness." A. N. Whitehead, Lowell Lectures of 1926.

Peter Hitchens's statement has the advantage that it locates morality firmly in the area of actions, not words.

Whitehead makes the mistake, however, of privatizing 'religion', and making it equivalent to morality.

Tony Dodd
In my day, my, parents didnt have fears about me walking home from a non alcohilic disco at the age of 15. with friend.
Today there needs to be much C.C.T.V along the way.
Today I have to worry about certain attitudes, not seen before as a mother, but also as a female myself.
One, I'm glad to say, lives idylically, more rurally, after where they were living became intolerable
.
Crime most definitely has changed, from estates of well ordered families, when knowledge of local criminals and certain families on certain estates was well known. When there was more fear of doing wrong. When bobbies patrolled and lived on estates in beat houses.
Today there are areas that have very "light touch" policing. Unrecognisable.
Age is on my side as I can tell you how detrimental that change is.
Which is why my concerns are great.

To Charlie,
To claim compassion is one thing, to be involved is another.

So here is a test question: What is the main overland route for a poor Afghan from Herat to Istanbul? (Name the key places, e.g. Zakho, and what you have to do there.)

If you know asylum seekers, many will have travelled it, and they will tell you. If you don't know, I will tell you in a later posting, because it is fascinating, and says a lot about the way these things work.

Charlie B “patronising drivel aimed at me confirms that I must have struck a nerve somewhere.”

No, you are just wrong.

And won’t answer basic questions about how many should come, and why you think the British peoples rights should be secondary to migrants and people who have contributed zero to this country?

As to your bizarre pot hole analogy, that is what we have democracies for. So people can decide how much money should be spent on filling them in vs picking up litter, or sweeping the streets. You have already confirmed you don’t believe in democracy because you think refugees and migrants in unlimited numbers should have the right to overrule the domestic population.

As far as I’m concerned Brexit is about regaining the power to make our own laws. One of which is deciding who comes into this country.

But there are lots of areas where we should make our own laws, not just immigration. We can’t do that if we stay in the EU, and worse the EU wants ever more power to have a European foreign policy and eventually a tax policy.

Can you imagine the nonsense of an EU Foreign policy? Who’s interest will it be
for? Germany’s? France? Italy? It certainly won’t be Britain’s.

We will probably also need some new politicians & civil servants in the UK., A lot of current ones are not used to taking responsibility or being accountable for their actions. They have been hiding behind the EU for thirty years. Which is why so many of them hate Brexit. They will have to do their jobs for a change. Earn their salaries and expense accounts. It will do them good. They might learn to like the responsibility.

Simply saying that the UK has the 5th largest GDP in the world says nothing about the actual wealth of the country. A better indicator is GDP per capita. On that scale the UK
comes in around 22-25 depending on whose doing the calculations. Not so impressive.

Charlie B.
Do you think because a person is a male asylum seeker or refugee, economic migrant, illegal migrant, (of course we cannot do anything about the ones that are illegal who come in and we have no knowledge of), that no attempt should be made to have an understanding of how his cultural attitudes and I would say especially on females may impact on local communites and especially with rise in larger numbers, often in certain areas of the country, the counties?

Do you discuss the problems we observe, or do you never discuss them and let them grow and carry on?
Did you listen to the guest speaker Angelina Jolie on Radio 4 Today the other week. The one where Justin Webb was very enamoured of her?
She talked of how we must help those women in war torn countries, where harassment,sexual assault, rape, kidnap, is prevalent.
Did you read about the parts of the world, where menstruating women are ostracised, not allowed to enter temples.
In fact only today, there was an article in The Mail, of how a female and her son died from the cold after being sent off.
Have you been reading about the dispute of who should pay the return flights of those young girls who are sent out of the country to marry against their will?

Did you read in the two articles Trevor Phillips wrote on the violence in London. About having honesty and how he had advised the government that those from the violent war torn countries, where machetes and he spoke of a particular form of injury used, that there needed to be psychological help?
I can't remember if they were Daily Mail online or the Saturday or Sunday Mail.
Is there anything you think that governments should have a think about when they are making immigration controls?
I'm coming from a female and maternal perspective.
Do you think not having forethought from governments and an immigration system there seems no trust in, is commendable?

If I was a genuine refugee, fleeing from a real threat of death, and I made it to safe ground with my family, say France, I would be just very thankful. I wouldn’t then say, “right, let’s get to Calais so I can try London for size. I hear the benefits are more beneficial.”

Has it ever occurred to the mass immigration lovers that we are letting in so many people, from so many different countries that many may not be safe here? After all, they don’t just bring their cultures, they bring all their disputes with other cultures. Centuries old conflicts now acted across a small island. Lovely.

Just before Christmas there was a headline which said Home secretary in dispute between British Muslims and British Hindus. Good luck trying to solve that. It’s only been raging for hundreds of years.

We now see in certain areas Jews moving out of parts of cities that they have lived without fear for decades. No doubt they can thank the moral superiority of the virtue signalling utopians.

The latest flurry of posts containing patronising drivel aimed at me confirms that I must have struck a nerve somewhere.

To Mr Hitchens who criticises “well-off liberals” for supporting measures that have an impact on others than themselves, I would respond that he is in fact doing the exact same thing by calling for all asylum seekers to be sent back to France (or Libya, or Turkey, etc). They will still need to seek medical treatment and send their children to school, but at least it won’t be in the UK. And who cares what happens to them anyway? Out of sight, out of mind. A typical case of NIMBY-ism.

Quite likely "false flags" performed by 'state assets' or dupes to provide excuses for increasingly totalitarian legislation, or to conveniently divert attention...
Such touching mass-media concern that some in parliament (who don't hesitate to insult the public, and often inflict far worse than that) might be inconvenienced or made to feel just a little bit insecure -- but is where is any serious concern expressed over who or what is going to protect the aforementioned public from those who nowadays rule?

Charlie B | 08 January 2019 at 10:46 AM :
*** As the country with the 5th largest GDP in the world. The UK has a moral duty to help people fleeing persecution.***

The usual reference to a "GDP" figure cooked up by economic cultists and political spin-doctors. But even within such figures, the actual concentration or distribution of wealth is not considered -- and certainly not taken into account is the reality that it isn't the rich who are forced to pay the price for those who rule (and numerous well paid apparatchiks) indulging themselves in ulterior motived virtue-signalling.
How can you -- despite claiming some sort of moralistic supremacy -- deny the fact that the agenda of ongoing mass-immigration which you support, actually amounts to the infliction of a form of genocide (as defined by the UN itself) upon the indigenous population?

Charlie B. is a True Believer (in Eric Hoffer's sense), and therefore impervious to evidence or reasoned argument. He has his pat, robotic responses ready to hand.

Perhaps he has been tasked to haunt this forum by the Foreign Office, a Soros-backed NGO, Common Purpose or the like; perhaps he is just a freelance spouter of bogus arguments. In either case, the result is the same.

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